Status: read in Czech

Or Love is for the birds. Even before he was a senator, Václav Láska (could be transcripted like Wenceslaus Love) was a mushroom picker. He remains obsessed with mushrooms to this day – in the best sense of the word, of course. And his whole book smells of mushrooms. Whether it's stories from forests, meadows and parks, or culinary advice, recipes and the secrets of mushroom cuisine. It opens up a fascinating world of mushrooms, both graceful and unsightly, that can taste like manna. And that can kill. The author's intention is to inspire the readers' desire for mushrooms to go search for and the courage to experiment with them in the kitchen, and to expand their list of mushroom species that they will regularly like to bring home from nature. There is no doubt that after reading this book you will start looking for a mushroom basket and a knife to clean them, so that you can go looking for them as soon as possible.

Rating: A very nicely written book about mushrooms, which I read practically in a sitting. It is not an atlas, although about half of the book is basically atlas with descriptions of groups of similar mushrooms (Boletaceae, Amanitaceae, Russulaceae, Cantharellaceae and so on, but also many species unknown to the holiday mushroom picker). The more essential part, into which the senator has imprinted much of his culinary skills and personal inventions, is especially the second part of the book about processing mushrooms in the kitchen, respectively, mainly about preserving and storing mushroom surpluses for a longer time in the pantry. Similar advice and recipes are not often found, and especially some types of treatments such as smoking or fermentation are quite unusual, but good ways of preserving mushrooms. This makes the book valuable to me, and many of the preservations mentioned are at least worth trying, if not to include them in the standard repertoire of the mushroom picker – cook and culinary artist.